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Home of The Saturday Evening PostTue, 03 Mar 2015 17:31:20 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1The Looming Water Crisishttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2013/06/25/in-the-magazine/trends-and-opinions/water-crisis.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2013/06/25/in-the-magazine/trends-and-opinions/water-crisis.html#commentsTue, 25 Jun 2013 12:00:20 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=87762Despite the easy flow of water from our sinks, showers, and garden hoses, in many parts of the country water is becoming dangerously scarce. We need to stop thinking of this precious life-giving substance as cheap and infinite.

Thanks to antiquated water policies, the enormous Lake Mead could run dry by 2021—if we do nothing about it.

Kylan Frye steers her Subaru station wagon along the slushy roadways of the Farmington Bay Waterfowl Management Area at the edge of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. It’s a February afternoon, gray and cold, and a layer of snow covers the wetlands that spread for miles around us. The Wasatch Range rises ruggedly in the background, but otherwise it feels like we’re driving through a barren white sea, indistinguishable from the pale sky if not for the occasional dots of sagebrush, sedge, and cottonwood. The air is thick with gull calls and the periodic flash of a great blue heron gliding by.

Frye, a conservation biologist at HawkWatch International, parks the car. Millions of birds use the Great Salt Lake to breed, feed, and rest, but there’s one in particular that I’m eager to see. The lake supports one of the top 10 winter populations of bald eagles in the continental United States—more than 500 birds whose habitat could be jeopardized by Utah’s ever-growing thirst for water.

We get out. With us is Zach Frankel, a biologist who runs the nonprofit Utah Rivers Council. Together, we look over the bay toward the mountains. At a break in the ice, dozens of gulls and northern pintail ducks have gathered. Behind them, standing still and alone, is something larger but hard to distinguish at this distance.

“Is there an eagle out there?” Frankel asks, pointing to the solitary bird.

“Might be,” Frye says. “They’re kind of all over.” She pulls out a spotting scope, a slipper-shaped magnifier that mounts on a tripod. Through the powerful lens, the eagle comes into focus: Posed elegantly against the alpine backdrop, it looks back over its shoulder like a Renaissance model waiting to be painted. This is the first eagle I’ve ever seen in the wild, and catching a glimpse of our national symbol socks me with a sudden surge of patriotism.

“The bald eagles are a success story of the Endangered Species Act,” Frye tells us. Reduced to 400 breeding pairs in the lower 48 states in 1963, the raptors became the target of an aggressive conservation effort that included habitat protection, captive breeding, and a ban on the shell-thinning insecticide DDT. By 2007 the population had rebounded to 10,000 pairs and the eagles were removed from the government’s list of threatened and endangered species.

But Frankel, who arranged this trip, is worried nonetheless. The Great Salt Lake borders a fast-growing metropolitan area that sprawls for more than 40 miles on either side of Salt Lake City, from Ogden in the north to Provo in the south. The Wasatch Front, as it’s called, houses two million people, the majority of Utah’s population. Its arid climate, cheap water rates, and green lawns mean its residents use extraordinary amounts of residential water—more, Frankel says, than the environment and its creatures can really spare. Now Utah officials say they need more sources of water to keep pace with growth. They’re eyeing the nearby Bear River, which (along with its tributaries) supplies 60 percent of the fresh water flowing into the Great Salt Lake. If the Bear is tapped, Frankel says, the shallow lake could see its levels drop by as much as 4 feet during dry years, shrinking the wetland habitat available to eagles and other birds.

“These birds fly thousands of miles and drop down exhausted on the Great Salt Lake to feed,” he says. Without sufficient water, “you will see a reduction in their food supply. You’ll see more crowding. You’ll see higher mortality rates from disease. The raptors that come here will lose their prey base. We’re concerned that we’re going to see millions of birds die off across hundreds of species.”

And Utah is hardly alone. Across the country, population growth and climate change are putting stresses on water supplies that we once took for granted (and often still do). Americans accustomed to blithely running bathtubs or garden hoses are discovering that existing sources are limited. Tapping new sources could have troubling consequences, which is why we need to stop thinking of water as cheap and infinite.

The history of the American frontier might appropriately be subtitled The Great Human Conquest of Water. The Mormon pioneers who migrated to Utah in the mid-19th century hunkered down in what was not exactly an obvious place to build a civilization. “Nonetheless, within hours of ending their ordeal, the Mormons were digging shovels into the earth beside the streams draining the Wasatch Range, leading canals into the surrounding desert which they would convert to fields that would nourish them,” Marc Reisner wrote in his 1986 book Cadillac Desert. “The Mormons attacked the desert full-bore, flooded it, subverted its dreadful indifference—moralized it—until they had made a Mesopotamia in America.” The dams and aqueducts that later sprung up throughout the West allowed us to build cities in places that previously seemed hostile to human settlement—Las Vegas, Phoenix, Denver, Los Angeles—along with sprawling farm operations in California’s San Joaquin Valley and elsewhere.
The West’s system of water governance was designed to ensure that everyone had enough. It assigned senior rights to the first arrivals, some of whose descendants today grow low-value, water-intensive crops like cotton, rice, and alfalfa. Those rules reflected a smaller, more rural America—before the growth of metropolises, before the modern industrial economy, before the coining of the term global warming. “In effect, we’re managing 21st-century challenges with 19th-century policies,” says Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, a California-based research group that specializes in water and sustainability. In some places, “we’ve given away too much water—more water than nature seems like it’s going to reliably provide us.”

Those decisions are catching up with us. Ten years ago, the U.S. General Accounting Office asked state water managers about their future concerns. Of the 47 states that responded, 36 predicted shortages by 2013 under normal conditions, 46 under drought conditions. Their forecasts proved prescient. In the Colorado River Basin, which encompasses seven states and is home to 40 million people, a government report released last December says demand could dramatically outstrip supply by 2060. The river’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, stand a 50-50 chance of running dry by 2021—if we do nothing to address dwindling resources, says another study by scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. (The basin includes parts of Utah but not the Salt Lake area.)

And the West doesn’t hold the monopoly on problems. “Increasingly, we are running into absolute limits on water supply—in lots of places, not just in places we’ve traditionally thought of as arid or dry,” says Gleick. Georgia, Alabama, and Florida, for example, have been battling among themselves over two river basins. Landlocked Atlanta wants the water for its drinking supply, while Florida and Alabama insist they need it both for human consumption and to support fish and shellfish populations.

Some researchers call the word shortage a misnomer. Even in the most overstretched areas, we turn on the tap and water comes out. The real problem comes from assuming we can proceed as we always have, that we don’t need to make adjustments to accommodate growing populations and diminishing resources. “It’s not that we don’t have enough water,” says Scripps Institution climate scientist David Pierce, who coauthored the Lake Mead study. “We don’t have enough to continue as we’ve been doing, with a lot of irrigated crops in the dry regions and rapidly growing cities.”

There’s another complicating factor: the acceleration of climate change. Scientists say higher temperatures will cause more evaporation and alter the slow, steady snowpack melts that provide much of the West’s water. Droughts will become more common too. Meanwhile, demand will increase as farmers and gardeners try to grow the same plants in hotter, drier conditions. A study by the consulting firm Tetra Tech, commissioned by the Natural Resources Defense Council, predicts that 1,020 U.S. counties, mostly in the Great Plains and Southwest, face high or extreme water-shortage risks by 2050 in large part because of climate change.

These forces seem epic and beyond our control. But the stresses on our water are also the product of what we all do in our cities and suburbs: how we price water, how we use it, and how we waste it.

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2013/06/25/in-the-magazine/trends-and-opinions/water-crisis.html/feed0Who Will Shape the New Decade?http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2009/12/26/history/post-perspective/shape-decade.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2009/12/26/history/post-perspective/shape-decade.html#commentsSat, 26 Dec 2009 14:00:21 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=16913Here we are, standing at history's curbside, watching a brand-new decade pulling up to us. At such moments, we naturally wonder where we'll go with these next 10 years.

]]>Predicting has become more difficult than ever. Consider the decade that arrived in 2000, and how few hints there were for the coming changes: the terrorist attacks, the Bush presidency, the collapse of major corporations, and the vanishing middle class.

The signs might have been there in 2000, but we were overshadowed by the news of the day. That year, Time magazine named George W. Bush as its person of the year. But how many of its “Newsmakers of 2000″ are still making news: Vojislav Kostunica, Mohammed Al-Durra, Robert Mugabe, Kim John IL, Vincente Fox Quesada, Cathy Freeman, George Speight, or John Roth?

It has always been difficult to spot the newsmakers who will eventually make vast changes. The first Post issue of 1910 is a good example. Its top story covered the British Prime Minister’s battle to curb the legislative power of the House of Lords. There is no mention of the World War that is a mere four years away.

A long, comic poem The World, the Flesh and 1909: A Galloping Epic in Six Canters and a “Whoa!” reviews the important topics of the previous year: President Taft’s first year, William Howard Taft, Turkish slaughter of Armenians, and Wilbur Wright’s record flight, Commodore Peary and the arctic-exploring fraud, Dr. Cook.

If the Post editors of 1910 had our knowledge, they would have devoted much more space to their weekly department, “Who’s Who—And Why.” The article concerns Gifford Pinchot, a forestry expert from North Carolina, who was to make a vast impact on American society.

To be fair to the editors, Pinchot had not yet taken the actions that changed global politics in the 20th Century. Before we describe these actions, we will quote from the Post article, which introduces Pinchot to its readers.

“When Colonel Roosevelt came into our humdrum lives as President, Pinchot, who had been dealing mostly with statesmen who had only one idea about trees, and that was to keep up the tariff on lumber, found a person after his own heart. The Colonel was a sort of tree-sharp himself. He had known Pinchot when he had lived in Washington previously, and had absorbed some of Pinchot’s ideas, as well as contributed a few of his own — a thing he never failed to do as he had a large of stock of idea on almost every subject.

Gifford Pinchot

“Pinchot lived trees, thought trees and talked trees. Beginning with the broad, general preposition that we must conserve our forest if we would continue great as a Nation, he had developed a conservation theory that included all our natural resources. He saw that Colonel Roosevelt was sympathetic … and the way he froze to that eminent gentleman was the wonder of Washington. Every time T. R. turned around he found Pinchot at his elbow, saying, “Well as we have a few minutes, let me explain again to you the necessity of forest reservations, of the conservation of our water power and the safeguard of other resources.

“When they were playing tennis and the Colonel had banged the ball, or all the balls, out of the lot, Pinchot would walk over and begin: “While we are resting let me point out to you the advantages — ” and so on. Any time there was a lull in the conversation at luncheon Pinchot came to bat with a few well-rounded sentences about conservation. He didn’t think about anything else or talk about anything else. He was as single-minded about it as a June bug trying to butt through a window-glass.

“Pinchot was one of the White House Steadies. He counted that day lost when he didn’t produce something new for the Colonel to reserve or conserve. Moreover, being an earnest person, and scrappaghous (sic) withal, he butted in every place he could. He had Jimmie Garfield on his staff, when Jimmie was Secretary of the Interior, and he ran various ends of that department as well as the Forest Service. There was no stopping Pinchot… until R. Achilles Ballinger came along as Mr. Taft’s Secretary of the Interior. Then Mr. Ballinger, being somewhat red-corpuscled himself, organized a clash, which is clashing yet.”

The writer concludes with a few observations of the Forest Service director:

“He is a quiet, effective man, intensely in earnest and on the job every minute of the day. He has a highly specialized intelligence and he is doing a big work for the country. He is an extremist, of course, as every man is who gets great results, and there are those who go further and call him a fanatic.”

Among those applying the “f” word to Pinchot was President Taft.

To pick up the story, we must add a little background on Taft and his mentor, Theodore Roosevelt. In 1904, flushed with victory, Roosevelt promised not to run for re-election in 1908. So in 1907, he personally selected his successor.

William Howard Taft had worked closely with Roosevelt, and had been his Secretary of War. Roosevelt believed Taft would continue his Progressive agenda: punishing the “malefactors of great wealth,” ensuring opportunity, launching social programs, and protecting the country’s natural resources.

President Taft from a Post cartoon. Weighing over 300 pounds, Taft is remembered as a man of great weight but little impact.

Taft won the election of 1908 with Roosevelt’s support. Once in office, though, he proved more cautious, but probably more thorough than Roosevelt in furthering Progressive reforms.

From the first days of his presidency, Taft indicated he would be less abrasive and more deliberate in his approach, which the Post editors applauded. They also praised his support for the Payne-Aldrich tariff bill, which would protect American industry from competition in the world market. On the editorial page, the Post proclaimed “Taft Opens the Door of Hope.”

The Progressive Republicans who had voted for Taft at Roosevelt’s urging were dismayed by this betrayal. The former president could not be reached for a comment; once he had won the election for Taft, Roosevelt set off for an extended African Safari.

Taft had compromised, but not fully betrayed the Progressives. He simply would not be rushed.

Pinchot had retained the Forest Service position that Roosevelt had given him. Taft didn’t like Pinchot’s activism, but he didn’t dare remove this close friend of Teddy. He did, however, remove Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, James Garfield, son of the assassinated president, and replaced him with Richard Ballinger.

Ballinger had earned a reputation as a reformer when he was Seattle’s mayor, but he was never a Progressive. The old-guard Roosevelt Republicans saw replacement as yet another example of Taft betraying the Progressive legacy.

As the Post article hinted, and as Taft probably intended, Interior Secretary Ballinger and Forest-Service Director Pinchot soon came to an impasse, particularly when Ballinger began making public resources available to businesses.

Pinchot urged Taft to investigate the new Interior Secretary, alleging that Ballinger was selling coal and water from national lands to private companies. Taft ordered an investigation, which found no proof of Ballinger’s corruption.

It was at this point in the story that the Post published its profile of Pinchot. What the Post, and the administration, didn’t foresee was Pinchot’s next move.

Shortly after this issue of the Post hit the newsstands, Gifford Pinchot brought his allegations against Ballinger before Congress. He criticized Taft and demanded that Congress conduct its own investigation into the Interior Secretary. Pinchot believed that Taft would have to get rid of Ballinger. The alternative was impossible: Taft could not fire Pinchot. He was too popular with Progressive Republicans and too close to Roosevelt.

But Taft did fire Pinchot and, consequently, lost the last of his support among the Progressive Republicans.

News finally reached Teddy Roosevelt, along with a report of the affair delivered by Pinchot himself. Furious, Roosevelt broke with his successor and formed his own Progressive Party in the 1912 election to pitch Taft out of the White House. The two friends ran against each other — Taft without much enthusiasm and Roosevelt without enough Republicans willing to cross over to his Bull Moose Party.

Pinchot had hoped he could force Taft to choose between his supporters in conservation and commerce. When Taft chose a more moderate, more business-friendly approach, he destroyed the last of his popular base. He also enabled the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson, to win the next election.

Had Roosevelt won the Presidency, the history of World War One would have been far different. As it was, Wilson’s approach to global policing led to an unstable Europe, which led to the Second World War, which led to the Cold War, which led to…

You can draw conclusions forever. The longer you draw them, though, the thinner they get, until you can ultimately argue that anything led to anything else.

Yet it’s not too much of a stretch to say that Gifford Pinchot’s dedication to conserving natural resources affected the course of American, and European, politics. We can state, with assurance, that he had a profound effect on the decade beginning in 1910.

All of which raises the question: Is there a government employee, working in a Washington agency, whose principled stand might upset the political establishment? Ultimately a man or woman of conviction will take a stand and, by a surprise move, turn the national power structure on its head.